Talk to the duck!

Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve had a funny day. Some confirmed acceptances for journals and an e-mail from a colleague regarding a collaboration that has stalled. When I set out to readjust my schedule to meet a sustainable pattern, I had a careful look at everything I needed to do but I overlooked one important thing: it’s easier to give the illusion of progress than it is to do certain things. For example, I can send you a ‘working on it’ e-mail every week or so and that takes me about a minute. Actually doing something could take 4-8 hours and that’s a very large amount of time!

So, today was a hard lesson because I’ve managed to keep almost all of the balls in the air, juggling furiously, as I trim down my load but this one hurts. Right now, someone probably thinks that I don’t care about their project – which isn’t true but it fell into the tough category of important things that needs a lot of work to get to the next stage. I’ve sent an apologetic and embarrassed e-mail to try and get this going again – with a high prioritisation of the actual work – but it’s probably too late.

The project in question went to a strange place – I was so concerned about letting the colleague down that I froze up every time I tried to do the work. Weird but true and, ultimately, harmful. But, ultimately, I didn’t do what I said I’d do and I’m not happy.

So how can I turn this difficult and unpleasant situation into something that I can learn from? Something that my students can benefit from?

Well, I can remember that my students, even though they come in at the start of the semester, often come in with overheads and burdens. Even if it’s not explicit course load, it’s things like their jobs, their family commitments, their financial burdens and their relationships. Sometimes it’s our fault because we don’t correctly and clearly specify prerequisites, assumed knowledge and other expectations – which imposes a learning burden on the student to go off and develop their own knowledge on their own time.

Whatever it is, this adds a new dimension to any discussion of time management from a student perspective: the clear identification of everything that has to be dealt with as well as their coursework. I’ve often noticed that, when you get students talking about things, that halfway through the conversation it’s quite likely that their eyes will light up as they realise their own problem while explaining things to other people.

There’s a practice in software engineering that is often referred to as “rubber ducking”. You put a rubber duck on a shelf and, when people are stuck on a problem, they go and talk to the duck and explain their problem. It’s amazing how often that this works – but it has to be encouraged and supported to work. There must be no shame in talking to the duck! (Bet you never thought that I’d say that!)

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!

I’m still unhappy about the developments of today but, for the purposes of self-regulation and the development of mature time management, I’ve now identified a new phase of goal setting that makes sense in relation to students. The first step is to work out what you have to do before you do anything else, and this will help you to work out when you need to move your timelines backwards and forwards to accommodate your life.

This may actually be one of the best reasons for trying to manage your time better – because talking about what you have to do before you do any other assignments might just make you realise that you are going to struggle without some serious focus on your time.

Or, of course, it may not. But we can try. We can try with personal discussions, group discussions, collaborative goal setting – students sitting around saying “Oh yeah, I have that problem too! It’s going to take me two weeks to deal with that.” Maybe no-one will say anything.

We can but try! (And, if all else fails, I can give everyone a duck to talk to. 🙂 )

Access to Education Considered Against Depth of Wallet.

Posted: August 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve posted a bit recently about proposals to increase the cost of education in Australia and, coincidentally, I have to deal with the loss of some students for what amount to purely financial reasons. To maintain student privacy, I won’t go into any detail but the bottom line is… well, the bottom line. Over the years I’ve lost students because they had to take up full-time work to cover sick family members, to pay bills that were running out of control and to pay for the many costs of a delayed-cost education that is never actually free.

Today, I lost another student because they could no longer afford to stay at Uni – that’s disheartening and irritating (for me, that is, I can only imagine that it is devastating to the student).

However, this pales in comparison with recent changes to the American college system in states such as California, where slashed state budgets are causing an economically based decision to recruit international and out-of-state applicants, as the fees paid are at least triple that of in-state students. The in-state students used to receive a state subsidy, but this is now disappearing or is no longer actually being paid. What has, of course, happened, is that now in-state students are becoming the out-of-state students of other states – if they can afford it – as places are given to more financially rewarding students locally.

But what happens to California’s local production of students who will actually stay in the state after graduation and contribute to the local economy? Of course, this is a problem that will start to get worse over time, not better, if the graduates that would retire the economy take their expertise back to their home state or country.

One of my major arguments with the recent report that suggested increasing fees in Australia was that it failed to recognise the public and ongoing benefit of a more educated population. Education changes lives, lifts us higher, allows us to see to the horizon and then over it. Vast quantities of educated people improve the areas in which they work. Yes, we make more money on average. But we also contribute in many and varied ways. Education transforms and provides opportunity – to everybody involved, not just those who are directly educated.

One of the things I welcome in the new discussions on distance and discontinuous education is that we can bring education to people who are outside of our bricks and mortar. We can accommodate and keep connected to the people who are having to study at the rate of 1 course/year because they can’t afford any more. But this requires us to think about what it really means to have to walk away from your one chance of getting  out, because you have to work to keep yourself or your family alive. Yes, people can value our degrees and education without showing up every day – maybe they have to choose between doing that and eating? I’m not saying “pass people who don’t do the work”, I’m saying “how can we make the work available for people to do?”

I think that, reflecting on this, we should be thinking about flexibility, compassion and understanding. We can’t fix everything at the Uni level, but we can make it easier for people to come back and, when they leave, let them know that we will take them back when they have the opportunity to return. It is the least that we can offer  and, at the same time, one of the best things we can do to help people who are faced with an awful choice.

However, as we have seen in California, things could be much worse – but it’s important to remember that before we make any longterm decisions that bring us closer to such a deep and potentially inescapable maelstrom.

The Key Difference (or so it appears): Do You Love Teaching?

Posted: August 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Please, any of my students reading this, do not give me an apple. I have sufficient!

I wander around fair bit for work. (I make it sound more impressive than that but the truth is that I end up in lots of different places to work on my many projects and sometimes the movement, although purposeful, is more Brownian than not – due to life.) I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of people who teach – some of whom are putting vast amounts of effort into it and some of whom aren’t.

The key difference, unsurprisingly, is generally the passion behind it. We see this in our students. They will spend days working on a Minecraft construction to simulate an Arithmetic and Logic Unit, but won’t always put in the two hours to write 20 lines of C++ code. They will write 20,000 words on their blog but can’t give you a 1,000 word summary.

We put effort into the things that we are interested in. Sure, if we’re really responsible and have self-regulation nailed, then we can do things that we’re not interested in, or actively dislike, but it’s never really going to have the same level of effort or commitment.

Passion (or the love of something) is crucial. Some days I have so much to say on the blog that I end up with 4-5 days stocked up in the queue. Some days I struggle to come up with the daily post or, as yesterday, I just run out of time to hit the 4am post cycle because I am doing other things that I am passionate about. Today, of course, the actual deadline timer is running and it seems to have made me think – now I’m passionate and now you’ll get something worth reading. If I’d stayed up until after my guests had left last night, written just anything to meet the deadline? It wouldn’t be anywhere near my best work.

Passion is crucial.

Which brings me to teaching. I know a lot of academics – some who are research/teaching/admin, some research only, some teaching/admin and… well, you get the picture. The majority are the ‘3-in-1’ academics and, in many regards, looking at their student evaluations and performance metrics will not tell you anything about them as a teacher that you can’t learn by sitting down with them and talking about their teaching. It is hard to shut me up about my courses and my students, the things I’m trying, the things I’m thinking of adopting, the other areas I’m looking at, the impact of what other Unis and people are doing, the impact of reports. I am a (junior) scholar in the discipline of learning and teaching and I really, really  love teaching. For me, putting effort into it is inevitable, to a great extent.

Then I talk to colleagues who really just want to do their research and be left alone. Everything else is a drag on their research. Administration will get the minimum effort, if it’s done. Teaching is something that you have to do and, if the students don’t get it, then it’s their fault. What is so weird about this is that these people are, in the vast majority, excellent scholars in their own discipline. They research and read heavily, they are aware of what every other researcher is doing in this area, they know if their work has a chance for publication or grants. Having these skills, they then divide the world into ‘places where I have to scholarly’ and ‘places where I can phone it in’. (Not all researchers are like this, I’m talking about the ones who consider anything other than research beneath them.)

What a shame! What a terrible missed opportunity for both these people who should be more aware of the issues of learning and teaching, and for the students who could be learning so much more from them? But when you actually talk to these academics, some of them just don’t liked teaching, they don’t see the point of putting effort into it or (in some cases) they just don’t know what to do and how to improve so they hunker down and try to let it all slide around them.

Part of this is the selective memory that we have of ourselves as students. I’m lucky – I was terrible. I was fortunate enough to be aware and mature enough as I reconstructed myself as a good student to see the transformative process in action. A lot of my peers are happy to apply rules to students that they wouldn’t (or don’t ) apply to themselves now or in the past, such as:

“I’m an academic who doesn’t like teaching, despite being told that it’s part of my job, so I’ll do the minimum required – or less on some occasions. You, however, are a student who doesn’t like the sub-standard learning experiences that my indifference brings you but I’m telling you to do it, so just do it or I’ll fail you.”

This isn’t just asymmetrical, this is bordering on the Stanford Prison Experiment, an arbitrary assignation of roles that leads to destructive power-derived behaviour. But, if course, if you don’t enjoy doing something then there are going to be issues.

Have we actually ever asked people these key questions as a general investigation? “Do you like teaching?” “What do you enjoy about teaching?” “What can we do to make you enjoy teaching more?” Would this muddy the water or clear the air? Would this earth our non-teaching teachers and fire them up?

Even where people run vanity courses (very small scale, research-focused courses design to cherry pick the good students) they are still often disappointed because, even where you can muster the passion to teach, if you don’t really understand how to teach or what you need to do to build a good learning experience, then you end up with these ‘good’ students in this ‘enjoyable’ course failing, complaining, dropping out and, in more analogous terms, kicking your puppy. You will now like teaching even less!

It’s blindingly obvious that some people don’t like teaching but, much as we wouldn’t stand out the front of a class and yell “PASS, IDIOTS!”, I’m looking for other good examples where we start to ask people why they don’t want to do it, what they’re worried about, why they don’t respect it and how we can get them more involved in the L&T community.

Let’s face it, when you love teaching, the worst day with the students is still a pretty good day. It would be nice to share this joy further.

In A Student’s Head – Mine From 26 Years Ago

Posted: August 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended an Australian Council of Deans of ICT Learning and Teaching Academy event run by Elena Sitnikova from the University of South Australia. Elena is one of the (my fellow?) Fellows in ALTA and works in Cyber Security and Forensic Computing. Today’s focus was on discussing the issues in ICT education in Australia, based on the many surveys that have been run, presenting some early work on learning and teaching grants and providing workshops on “Improving learning and teaching practice in ICT Education” and “Developing Teamwork that Works!”. The day was great (with lots of familiar faces presenting a range of interesting topics) and the first workshop was run by Sue Wright, graduate school in Education, University of Melbourne. This, as always, was a highly rewarding event because Sue forced me to go back and think about myself as a student.

This is a very powerful technique and I’m going to outline it here, for those who haven’t done it for a while. Drawing on Bordieu’s ideas on social and cultural capital, Sue asked us to list our non-financial social assets and disadvantages when we first came to University. This included things like:

  • Access to resources
  • Physical appearance
  • Educational background
  • Life experiences
  • Intellect and orientation to study
  • Group membership
  • Accent
  • Anything else!

When you think about yourself in this way, you suddenly have to think about not only what you had, but what you didn’t have. What helped you stay in class?What meant that you didn’t show up? From a personal perspective, I had good friends and a great tan but I had very little life experience, a very poor study ethic, no real sense of consequences and a very poor support network in an academic sense. It really brought home how lucky I was to have a group of friends that kept me coming to University. Of course, in those pre-on-line days, you had to come to Uni to see your friends, so that was a good reason to keep people on campus – it allowed for you to learn things by bumping into a people, which I like to refer to as “Brownian Communication”.

“Hey, Neutrino 3 is trying to put together a Learning and Teaching Grant. Who’s in?”

This exercise made me think about my transition to being a successful student. In my case, it took more than one degree and a great deal more life experience before I was ready to come back and actually succeed. To be honest, if you looked at my base degree, you’d never have thought that I would make it all the way to a PhD and, yet, here I am, on a path where I am making a solid and positive difference.

Sue then reminded people of Hofstede’s work on cultural dimensions – power distance, individualism versus collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. How do students work – do they need a large ‘respect gap’ between student and teacher? Do they put family before their own study? Do they do anything rather than explore the uncertain? It’s always worth remembering that, where “the other” exists for us, we exist as “the other” reciprocally. While it’s comfortable as white, culturally English and English speaking people to assume that “the other” is transgressing with respect to our ‘dominant’ culture, we may be asking people to do something that is incredibly uncomfortable and goes far beyond learning another language.

One of the workshop participants was born and grew up in Korea and he made the observation that, when he was growing up, the teacher was held at the same level of the King and your father – and you don’t question the King or your father! He also noted that, on occasion, ‘respect’ had to be directed towards teachers that they did not actually respect. He had one bad teacher and, in that class, the students asked no questions and just let the teacher talk. As someone who works within a very small power distance relationship with y students, I have almost never felt disrespected by anything that my students do, unless they are actively trying to be rude and disrespectful. If I have nobody following, or asking questions, then I always start to wonder if I’ve been tuned out and they are listening to the music in their heads. (Or on their iPhones, as it is the 21st Century!)

Australia is a low power distance/high individualism culture with a focus on the short-term in many respects (as evidence by profit and loss quarterly focus and, to be frank, recent political developments). Bringing people from a high PD/high collectivism culture, such as some of those found in South East Asia, will need some sort of management to ensure that we don’t accidentally split the class. It’s not enough to just say “These students do X” because we know that we can, with the right approach, integrate our student body. But it does take work.

As always, working with Sue (you never just listen to Sue, she always gets you working) was a very rewarding and reflective activity. I spent 20 minutes trying to learn enough about a colleague from UniSA, Sang, that I could answer questions about his life. While I was doing this, he was trying to become Nick. What emerged from this was how amazingly similar we actually are – different Unis, different degrees, different focus, one Anglo-origin, one Korean-origin – and it took us quite a while to find things where we were really so different that we could talk about the challenges if we had to take on each other’s lives.

It was great to see most of the Fellows again but, looking around a large room that wasn’t full to the brim, it reminded me that we are often talking to those people who already believe that what we’re doing is the right thing. The people that really needed to be here were the people who weren’t in the room.

I’m still thinking about how we can continue our work to reach out and bring more people into this very, very rewarding community.

 

Teaching Ethics in a Difficult World: Free Range and Battery Games

Posted: August 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Note, this is not a post about the existing game company, Free Range Games, although their stuff looks cool!)

I enjoy treating ethics or, to be more precise, getting the students to realise the ethical framework that they all live within. I’ve blogged before about this and how easy it is to find examples of unethical behaviour but, as we hear more stories about certain ‘game-related’ industries and the way that they teach testers, it becomes more and more apparent that we are reaching a point where the ethical burden of a piece of software may end up becoming something that we have to consider.

We’re already aware of the use of child labour in some products and people can make a decision not to shop at certain stores or buy certain products – but this requires awareness and tying the act to the brand.

In the areas I live in, it’s very hard to find a non-free range chicken, even in a chicken take-away shop (for various definitions of ‘free range’ but we pretty much do mean ‘neither battery nor force fed’) and eggs are clearly labelled. Does this matter to you? If so, you can make an informed decision. Doesn’t matter to you? Buy the cheapest or the tastiest or whichever other metric you’re using.

Free Range Tasmanian Devils. Don’t eat the eggs!

But what about games? You don’t have to look far (ea_spouse and the many other accounts available) to see that the Quality Assurance roles, vital to good games, are seeing a resurgence in the type of labour management that is rapidly approaching the Upton Sinclair Asymptote. Sinclair wrote a famous turn-of-the 20th Century novelisation of the conditions in the meat packing industry, “The Jungle”, that, apart from a rather dour appeal to socialism at the end, is an amazing read. It changed conditions and workers’ rights because it made these invisible people visible. Once again, as well apparently fall in love with the ‘wealth creators’  (an Australian term that is rapidly become synonymous with ‘robber baron’) all over again, we are approaching this despite knowing what the conditions are.

What I mean by this is that it is well known that large numbers of staff in the QA area in games tolerate terrible conditions – no job security, poor working conditions, malicious and incompetent management – and for what? To bring you a game. It’s not as if they are fighting to maintain democracy (or attack democracy, depending on what you consider to be more important) or staying up for days on end trying to bring the zombie infection under control. No, the people who are being forced into sweatboxes, occasionally made to work until they wet themselves, who are unceremoniously fired at ‘celebration’ events, are working to make sure that the people who wrote your game didn’t leave any unexplained holes in the map. Or that, when you hit a troll with an axe, it inflicts damage rather than spontaneously causing the NyanCat video to play on your phone.

This discussion of ethics completely ignores the ethics of computer games that demean or objectify women, glorify violence or any of the ongoing issues. Search for ethics of video games and it is violence and sexism that dominates the results. It’s only when you start searching for “employee abuse video game” that you start to get hits. Here are some quotes from one of them.

It seems as though the developers of L. A. Noire might have been under more pressure themselves than any of the interrogated criminals in their highly praised crime drama. Reports have surfaced about employees being forced to work excruciating hours, in some cases reaching 120 hour weeks and 22 hour days. In addition, a list has been generated of some 130 members of the Australian-based Team Bondi, the creators of L. A. Noire, whose names have been omitted from the game’s own credits.

…

On the subject of the unprecedented scope of the project for Australian developers, McNamara replied, “The expectation is slightly weird here, that you can do this stuff without killing yourself; well, you can’t, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever; you’re competing against the best people in the world at what they do, and you just have to be prepared to do what you have to do to compete against those people. The expectation is slightly different.”

The saddest thing, to me, is that everyone knows this. The same people who complain on my FB feed back how overworked they are and how little they see their family then go out and buy games that have been produced in electronic sweatshops. You didn’t buy L. A. Noire? Rockstar San Diego are on the “overworking staff” list for “Red Dead Redemption” and the “not crediting everyone” for “Manhunt 2”. (That last one might not be so bad!)

Everyone talks about the crunch as if it’s unavoidable. Well, yes , it is, if you intend to work people to the crunch. We’ve seen similar argument for feedlot meat production, battery animals and, let’s not forget, that there have always been “excellent” reasons for slavery in economic and social terms.

This is one of the hardest things to talk about to my students because they’re not dumb. They read, often more widely than I do in these areas. They know that for all my discussions of time management and ethics, if they get a certain kind of job they will work 7 days a week, 10-14 hours a day, in terrible conditions and maybe, just maybe, if they sell their soul enough they can get a full-time job, rather than being laid off indiscriminately. They know that the message coming down from these companies is “maximum profit, minimum spend” and, of course, most of these game companies aren’t profitable so that’s less about being mercenary and more about survival.

But, given that these products are not exactly… essential (forgive me, Deus Ex!), one has to wonder whether terms like ‘survival’ have any place in this discussion. Is it worth nearly killing people, destroying their social lives and so one, to bring a game to market? People often say “Well, they have a choice” and, in some ways, I suppose they do – but in an economic market where any job is better than job, and people can make decisions at 15 that lead to outcomes they didn’t expect at 25, this seems both ungenerous and thoughtless.

Perhaps we need the equivalent of a ‘Free Range/Organic’ movement for games: All programmers and QA people were officially certified to have had at least 8 hours sleep a night, with a minimum break of 50 hours every  6 days and were kept at a maximum density of 2 programmers per 15 square metres, in a temperature and humidity controlled environment that meets recognised comfort standards.

(Yeah, I didn’t include management. I think they’re probably mostly looking after themselves on that one. 🙂 )

 

Then you can choose. If it matters to you, buy 21st century Labour Force Games – Ethically and sustainably produced. If it doesn’t matter, ignore it and game on.

 

Let’s stop subsidising education! (Andrew Norton, Grattan Institute)

Posted: August 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments

This article was published in the Australian, Australia’s national (and conservatively inclined) newspaper. This is the lead quote:

“Tuition subsidies merely redistribute income to students and graduates. The general public, particularly those who do not go to university, are worse off. They forgo other government benefits or pay higher taxes while receiving nothing additional in return,” Andrew Norton.

This quote comes from a report from the Grattan Institute, written by Andrew Norton, entitled “Graduate Winners”. His thesis is that, counter-intuitively, subsidising education doesn’t level the playing field, rather it robs non-University educated Australians of their fair share.

Basically, Australia runs a deferred payment scheme that is also government subsidised. Norton’s point is, effectively, that having put everything into a loan scheme, the amount doesn’t matter and it therefore wouldn’t disadvantage people to pay more. We’ve seen this before, of course, where people remove subsidies and let the market fix a price: as the article says, in New Zealand this led to a tripling and Britain is in the middle of major hikes. We’ve also seen the US where students never get out from under their debt load.

Here, in Australia, people do actually clear their debt. Not quickly, admittedly, but it’s possible. You can get out and clear of your debt under the current scheme. It’s relatively embarrassing for Norton that he wasn’t (apparently) present at HERDSA when speakers talked about the socially disadvantaged being more acutely debt averse than other sectors – and increasing the debt is not going to help that problem.

I must be honest, I always have a suspicion of schemes that, from whatever basis of argument, seem to end up with ‘the rich kids get places’, but this is a personal bias. Perhaps this report contains the convincing argument that will sway me, finally? (To be honest, the whole document has this weird aroma of capitalism wrapped up in a central planning framework, running on the sniff of the invisible hand.)

What I find fascinating is that, in the middle of an Australian federal sector that is increasingly focussing on the wealth creators, there appears to be no connection between the Universities and their contribution to a society, the report is focused on personal salaries and assumes that everyone goes out to maximise their income. The section of the report that discussed public benefits talks about increased tax benefit, tolerance and things like that – but what seems to be missing (I did read it at speed so that might be fault) is a discussion of the benefit of having well-trained professionals in your society.

It’s as if the students of Universities have never turned into the professionals that have done small things like design our roads, keep our air fleets running, stop disease from killing the population – you know, little things. Is it seriously contended that the people who have graduated from University have never done anything at all except take extra salary at the expense of other people?

I won’t say any more on this as I need to digest it in more detail but I thought you might be interested in a completely different view on how to handle a public educational system.

Whackademia: Anectopia, More Like. (A Rather Opinionated Review)

Posted: August 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I recently posted about some of the issues that we face in Academia and, being honest, they aren’t small problems and they aren’t limited to one locale or country. You may also recall that I wrote a summary of a radio interview with Richard Hil, the author of Whackademia and I said that I’d write more on Richard’s thoughts when I finished the book.

Hmm. Be careful what you commit to. This book is long on moan but short on solution. But, to explain this, I must be long on moan – please forgive me. I realise that some of you may feel that I am a heavily corporatised shill, who the book is targeted against, and therefore unworthy to comment on this so caustically. Believe me when I say that I believe that my role is to hold my integrity  in my job while trying to achieve a better environment in which all of us can perform our jobs – and I believe that anyone who knows me and what I do would agree with that. If I am a shill, then I am the shill that you want on your side because it would be harder to find anyone more committed to the purity of learning and teaching and the world enriching nature of research. Yes, I am an idealist who walks with the devil sometimes, but my soul is still my own.

There were a couple of points in the original radio interview when I would have preferred that Hil go into more detail, or provide some more supporting evidence. I can honestly say that my desire for some more substance has still not been met.

There is no doubt that there are problems, that rampant managerialism is not helping, that a review of the sector in the light of a reduced commitment to funding from the government is important. But what is presented in Hil’s book is a stream of unattributed complaint, whinging and, above all, a constant litany of admissions of unethical behaviour from Hil’s interview participants – with the defence that they were told to comply so, of course, they did. Rather than interpreting this as a group of noble warriors being forced to bend their heads before a cruel and unjust overlord, I read this as the words of people who, having one of the most important jobs in the world, took the easier path.

Do I think that I’ve ever assigned a mark to a student that they didn’t earn?

No. No, I don’t. This is at odds with any number of Hil’s interviewees who freely admitted to fixing marks when asked to, bending over in the face of the administrative wind and, then, having the hide to complain about slipping standards and lack of freedom. I don’t interpret the monitoring levels of academic progress and student progressions rates as a requirement to pass people, I regard it as a way of ensuring that we fairly advertise what is required to pass our courses, that we provide opportunities for students to display their ability and that we focus on education – taking difficult things and conveying them to students.

Show me someone who is proud that their course is so tough that 90% of students fail it and, frankly, I think that they can call themselves anything they like, as long as the word teacher or educator isn’t used. I could fail 100% of students who take my course – gaze upon my works, for there are none as smart as I! This isn’t academic integrity, this is hubris.

Why am I so disappointed in this work? Because I agree with a number of Hil’s points but he presents the weakest, anecdotal means for supporting it. “Whackademia” is eminently dismissible and this is a terrible thing, as it makes the genuine problems that are raised easier to dismiss.

I am still desperately searching for a solution, a proposal from Hil that is more tangible than a fragmented wish list and anything other than his journey through a poisonous and frustrated Anectopia – light on fact but dripping with salacious, unsubstantiated detail. I really shouldn’t be surprised. If you read the contents page, you’ll see that Chapter 7 is entitled “Enough Complaint: now what?” on page 193. Given that the book is over by page 230, that’s a lot of complaint to solution! (Note to self, check the ratio in this post…)

Let me give you some quotes:

“Additionally, older interviewees argued that younger academics were far more likely to have adopted today’s regulatory rationalities, in contrast to more seasoned academics who are perhaps more resistant to the new order. Whether or not this is true is less important than the fact that, to survive and thrive in the current tertiary culture, certain compromises may have to be made – even if this feels at times like putting one’s soul out to tender.” p91

Whether or not this is true?  Hang on, truth is optional in this sentence?

Let me put that quote back together with the qualifiers and questionable modifiers highlighted.

“Additionally, older interviewees argued that younger academics were far more likely to have adopted today’s regulatory rationalities, in contrast to more seasoned academics who are perhaps more resistant to the new order. Whether or not this is true is less important than the fact that, to survive and thrive in the current tertiary culture, certain compromises may have to be made – even if this feels at times like putting one’s soul out to tender.”

Hil goes out of his way to sensationalise his account, a great shame as the problems themselves are very important. He has a deep distaste for the word “excellent” – a shame as it’s not exactly a neologism and has a well-defined meaning. This is, however, a bad word in Hil’s lexicon, although he suggests that it be used as a subversive tool later on. He also drops in quotes such as:
“faculties – sometimes referred to as ‘corporate silos'” p87
I have heard the word ‘silo’ used at Universities, but almost exclusively in the phrase “breaking down/open the silos” to reduce compartmentalisation between schools, disciplines, and universities. This is yet another example of the greatest offence that Hil’s work is committing. It is, on my first reading, fundamentally unacademic. Wikidemia would be a better title for this week – a set of anonymous comments stitched together by an editor with a strong bias and an agenda of such strength and purpose that you could sail it across Bass Strait in a storm.
This is not a book that solves problems, this is a book for the disaffected, the resentful, the pettily defiant and, above all, for the academic who bends, who cuts and runs, who bemoans their fate and, when the going gets tough, scurries off to a safe position where none can touch him and then tells everyone how terrible his old place was, now that he is safely out of reach.
Yes, Hil has some valid points but any of their power is lost in his dedication to digging out the most unhappy of the academics in Australia and listening to them intently as he waits for yet another barren bon mot to birth. After pages 75-81, where two older Professors bemoan the interference of management, Hil provides us with supporting evidence for why these claims are true:
“These sorts of observations might be dismissed out of hand by today’s university managers as elitist, sentimental drivel, born of resentment of the new corporate reality. Well, if indeed these reflections are drivel then they are shared by all but one of the ten or so older professors I interviewed for this book.”
When your sample size is “ten or so” then excuse me if a 90% agreement in a sample size that is smaller than the set of retired professors that I personally know in the local community of a small University in a small state fails to convince me. With anecdata like this, of course this work will be dismissed by those who should be listening about the genuine problems.
Worse, with an incitement to petty rebellion as one of his ‘solutions’, starting on page 202, Hil shows his true, selfish and ultimately anti-collegial stance. Rather than undertake actions of true leadership and academic integrity, Hil suggests a range of options including claiming depression or stress disorders to fake your way out of workload, focusing on high achievers rather than ‘at-risk’ students or pretending frankness and honesty as a means of subversion.
Let me out myself, in public, as someone who has wrestled with depression all of his life and who has never, ever, for any reason used that as an excuse except where the black dog was so heavy that I couldn’t move – in other words, when I had a legitimate medical excuse. To think that Hil is advocating fakery, elitism and disingenuity as a valid means of resistance is repugnant. Hil’s proposals suggest a person who feels that they are entitled to their privilege and damn anybody who gets in their way.
This critical failure of empathy, the ‘at all costs’ approach to bring back the halcyon days before just anyone could get into Uni and no-one questioned what you were up to, where genuine problems are faked and students are just pawns, is a disgraceful sentiment to hold, let alone air in public.
For shame, sir. I was lectured in the 80’s by the people that you so admire and let me tell you that most of them were rubbish – not shining lights of academic freedom but barely worthy of the title ‘teacher’. To pretend that the old days had some mystical component that made everyone competent or (sorry, Richard) excellent is the worst example of nostalgic naval-gazing. Yes, some were very good, but I would happily take my colleagues now (who span the age range) and put them against my lecturers then, and I know who would hold the class, communicate more knowledge, engender a greater sense of community and, ultimately, build better people. We have learned a great deal in the scholarship of learning and teaching and now we have some wondrous tools – but we are learning to use them better every year. The mindless use of any technique or tool will have poor results and it is foolish to pretend otherwise. But to pretend that a pre-technological period was some glorious golden age is at best Tolkienism, if not tending towards a Luddite heading. Sensible use – yes! Sensible management – yes! Focus on learning and teaching – yes! Being able to hide in my office and pretend that the 20th century didn’t happen? No!
I already knew of all of the problems that are listed in this book and reading a steady stream of complaint that offered no solution did not grant me any magical insight into the problems – it just made me angry that Hil’s privileged position, that could have been used so well, was squandered for a splashy and sensationalist account that is selling for about $35.00 a copy. One can only hope that he’s doing something with the money other than foment discord. Given the tone of some of the book, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if he was training a squadron of pigeons to crap on the Head of School that he disliked – it has the correct feel of the red-eyed madness that infuses the more foaming paragraphs.

Hil’s book is identified on the cover as a searing exposé from an insider but, as someone who is also on the inside, it appears that the insides that we inhabit are distinctly different. No doubt, there are people inside my own institution who would read Hil’s words and shiver with the rightness of his words: “Yes, I am being pushed around!”, “Yes, I have to take shortcuts because big bad Admin makes me!”, “Yes, students are just sometimes too stupid for my wonderful course and I should be allowed to fail 80% of them!” But I’d disagree with them as much as I disagree with Hil.

The greatest disappointment I ever feel is when someone squanders their opportunities and their gifts, especially when they destroy opportunities for other people. In this case, not only has Hil wasted his spot in the sun, he has made it harder for a more thoughtful and constructive book to be written as his work, writ large in the media and read widely, will control and shape the debate for some time to come.

Again, for shame, sir.

Long post ahead!

Posted: August 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , | 3 Comments

A brief note that the next post, due for scheduled release at 4am Central Australian Daylight Time (GMT+9.5), is about 2,000 words long because I got rather heated while reviewing Richard Hil’s “Whackademia.” You might want to save the next post for a short flight, such as that from Sydney to Los Angeles. If you are Richard Hil, you might want to skip it.

Have a great weekend or Friday, depending on your time zone!

All That Glisters Is Not Gold

Posted: August 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

We’ve seen some disgraceful behaviour in the local media regarding “underperformance” at the Olympic Games. Australia fancies itself in a couple of sports – swimming is definitely one of them. It would be, sadly, an overstatement to say that we are good winners and bad losers – we’re smug winners, as a media scrum (the athletes are generally quite humble), and we’re absolutely vile losers. If someone from another nation (which isn’t Britain or the US) happens to beat us, then out come the accusations of doping, or sly comments. A young man who has achieved Olympic Silver and has missed out by 1/100th of a second is confronted, just out of the pool, by an ex-swimmer who should know better asking if he’s feeling shattered. What does it achieve? Do we need it? Do we care?

Why should he feel shattered? Did he stop for a drink half-way? Did he throw the comp (as some athletes who have already been expelled did)? No? Then let it go.

I was watching the kayaking (I was trapped in an airport lounge) and the guy who came third was absolutely stoked – a Bronze for Czechoslovakia! Why? Because he did his best and it happened to get him a medal. The lone male Australian athletics competitor came 19th but it was the best result for mens athletics for Oz in decades, I believe, so that was a good thing and he got some brief praise on the television. Sadly, and I’m sorry, athletics people, I think that’s because nobody expected him to do that much and, being very honest, very few people give two hoots about Australia’s performance in this area. (I will be surprised if he’s ever mentioned again – which is terrible after his achievement.)

Here’s what everyone sitting on a couch, remote in hand, beer in the other, criticising these athletes for getting Silver (woo), Bronze (gasp!) or (hushed silence) no medal (no hoper!) is secretly reciting to themselves.

“We’re sun-bronzed Aussies! We’re cut out of the same rock and leather as the outback heroes who became ANZACs and went off to war, larger than life and twice as tall! We own the pool! We rule the velodrome! We occasionally shoot things with guns and bows! We’ll remember who you are for a few minutes in another sport if you win a medal – we’ll make you a natural treasure if you’re cute, you win through an amazing series of people falling over or if you get us unexpected medals in a Winter Olympics. We might even remember your name.

For a while.

Of course, run into a pommel horse and break your jaw and we’ll play that on the TV for 20 years because nothing appeals to us more than the humiliating failure of people that we would praise if they won.”

(Note that this is not everyone who watches the Olympics but it’s certainly everyone who walked around for the last day or so giving our swimmers a hard time or accusing the Chinese swimmers of doping. Seriously, that’s your first reaction?)

What a curse of expectation lies over all of this – the sport you pick, the way you do it, people sitting in armchairs judging professional athletes as to how much over their PB they should have achieved. You know what I’m drawing to here. This is exactly what happens to people who come to Uni as well. If you’re first-in-family and not well supported, then you’ll be listening to people telling you that you’re wasting your time. If you’re getting distinctions, why not HDs? (Hey, if you’re offering constructive assistance and support, I have much less problem. If you’re saying ‘Wow, 98, what happened to the other 2’ and even vaguely mean it? Shame on you.) Everyone else did better than you? Why not drag up a racial or cultural stereotype, or accuse the staff of favouritism, or come up with any excuse other than “I didn’t do anything”. I still have a lot of sympathies for these students because I think that a lot of this rubbish comes in from around you. If you’re not excelling, then why bother?

This kind of culture is pervasive – you win, or you’re nothing. If someone else wins, they cheated, or (somehow) it wasn’t fair. It’s impossible to construct a sound learning framework out of rubbish like this. What’s worse is that if you start to think that everyone else is winning by cheating or by being ‘lucky’, then suddenly little switches go off in your head as your rationalisation engine starts shutting down the ethical cut-outs.

I generally try not to watch sports or commentary around Olympics time because, for all of the amazing athletic effort, there’s always far too much hype, nonsense and unpleasantness for me to able to appreciate it. It’s no wonder a lot of my students can barely think sometimes as they stress themselves into careers that they don’t want, degrees they don’t need, or towards goals that they aren’t yet ready to achieve, when we have such a ferocious media scrum hanging around the necks of our best sportspeople. You tell people that’s what winning looks like and, be careful, they might believe you.

To Leave or Not To Leave (Academia)

Posted: July 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

There’s a post that’s been making the rounds from a University of New Mexico academic who is leaving to go to Google. Mark has blogged on it, and linked to a more positive post that reinforces why you would stay in the job, but my reaction to the original post is that there are far too many solid, scoring, points being made and, while it’s not gloom for the whole sector yet, there are large storm clouds hanging heavily over our heads.

I think that we’ve made some crucial mistakes that, on reflection, we need to address if we want to stop people leaving. Be in no doubt, when the storms come, yes, the casual workforce takes it in the neck but a lot of other people jump as well. They go somewhere else that supports them, inspires them, challenges them and does not make them wonder why they’re doing the job. It takes 10-20 years to produce a “useful” academic. Get the University climate wrong and they will pick up and leave. Will that work for everyone? No. It will work for your passionate, knowledgable, personable, approachable and amazing staff who will easily find work elsewhere.

Which, of course, leaves your schools and departments gutted of the firebrands, the doers, the visionaries and those who can inspire and lead the rest of us to the same level. I believe that we can all lift to the level of these great people – if we can remain in contact with them. Take them away and we stagnate. We all know, deep down, that bad cultures come from uninspired people, and uninspired people are uninspiring. Gut a school enough and you will have a terrible time of rebuilding it. But what happened?

I think that we made three terrible mistakes.

  1. We let people cut our funding and we all just worked harder.
    If you can cut the amount that you pay the worker, while keeping the same productivity level, why on earth would you pay them any more? You separate the worth of the activity or the person from the value that they produce and then you try to maximise your profits. Why do people keep cutting University and school funding? Because we just step up and work harder because we are committed to our jobs.
    What is worse, we not only work harder at our real jobs, we do all of the extra stuff as well.
  2. We did all of the admin on top of our real jobs, which include mentoring, guidance, teaching, learning, research, and so on.
    This is the crazy thing – not only are we all working harder meeting imposed metrics and standards, we’re also filling out countless forms, sitting around in meetings arguing about paperclip purchase optimisation (or similar) or sitting through yearly regurgitations of what we’ve done, delivered by other academics who can’t manage, and we do it almost as hard as we do the things that we get paid to do as academics.
  3. We didn’t sit down and weigh up the future cost of steps 1 and 2.
    And here’s the killer. Because we’re doing 1 and 2, and because the sky hasn’t fallen and education is still happening, administrators and funding bodies would be crazy to not try and push this further in order to see if they can get even more savings out and still maintain the same levels. This is fundamental business practice – pay the least that you have to for your supplies, charge the most that you can for your product.
    Ultimately, this will kill us. We are have gone from comfortable, to lean and mean – now we’re heading towards starvation. Rather than worrying about this, we stand and admire ourselves in the mirror like mentally ill thirteen year-olds, congratulating ourselves on how good we look when we are starting to lose important function – irreversibly. The fat, such as it was (and I think that has been overplayed for political reasons), is gone. Now we’re cutting muscle and organs.
    Governments talked about tight times, funding bodies talked about financial crises, business found cheaper overseas workers, off-shoring meant that local investment started to dry up – we listened, we nodded, we said “Ok, we’ll keep going” and we sent completely the wrong message.
    Universities take 10-20 years to train academics, but the impact of a drop in educated populace takes about the same time to really have an impact on the workforce. This is well beyond the average lifespan of an elected official and it’s not as direct as the “in your face” nature of a tax increase. But this is our fault, to and extent, because we know that this is a problem and, as a group, we took it.

I had an argument with someone the other day about the role of academics and they were, I think, angry with me because I placed pedagogy and learning quality as a higher priority than convenience of access to the students. Of course, I want everyone to have access to Uni but if what we are teaching is not of sufficient quality then there is no point coming! As a teaching academic, this should be my job. Social equity, access to University, increasing mobility and improving the school systems? That’s the government’s job, the government’s purse, working in association with the schools and universities – I welcome it! I support it! But I have neither the funds, the influence or the training to actually do this. Yet, because of shortfalls elsewhere, as our funding is cut, as the casual workforce grows, as we all work harder , more and more of the things that are not core fall on me and my colleagues.

This is a fantastic job. This is an important job. Universities, in whatever form, are vital to the future and development of our species – when they are run properly and to a high standard. I do not think that all is lost, but I am rapidly reaching a point where I think that we have to stop taking it, look at those crucial three mistakes and say “No more.” Funding bodies, administrators and, on occasion, we ourselves are devaluing ourselves through our professionalism, our dedication and our politeness. Yes, we need to be pragmatic but we have worth, we do a good job and we are part of an essential role: education must be maintained.

My priority is to my students and my colleagues, and to the future. I think that it’s time for some serious re-thinking.

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